After the credits, I vacuum. I vacuum for hours and hours.

As the real world feels increasingly devoid of magic, we are correct to admire those writers who attempt to interject some magic back into it.

Transcendental with Reincarnation 

I was a bank/ cashier who stole /a five-dollar bill/ I was Laika/ a stray selected/ no more than bark/ part-husky/ part-terrier/ canine space orbiter/

By now you tell me how I feel.
You tell me
what I will do and how I will act.
You do the creating
for me,

Everyone picks the chairs up and puts them in a circle. Then they turn the music on and you start to walk along the perimeter.

I think ten t-shirts would be too many to write about, but I’m perversely hoping that twenty-two is somehow not too many. A writer can, I think, pass beyond “too many” or “too much” to a sense of rightness or aptness. The paradox: More than too much is sometimes not too much.

I can't in good conscience watch a sixteenth season of Big Brother.

My family’s eponymous foundation is a donor to Columbia University, in whose MFA program in Creative Writing I was enrolled, but due to some substance abuse problems last semester, I had to drop out . . .

What if you spent a morning pulling scallions from the soil and washing beets in a metal sink?

The first seven years we dolled ourselves up as witches in black nylon and swampy grease paint.

I'm going to abandon everything / after this poem 

Had a dream he was chained to a mountain while a buzzard ate his liver.

By the time Zoe and I started down the Overseas Highway, we had been living a nomadic lifestyle out of our 1995 Corolla for nearly four months. 

What dispossessed me sat erect beside the checked quilt in fishnets.

Violette moved away from Calvin toward a group of rhododendrons.

Calvin felt calm.

He thought about God.

& no I'm still not thirsty / although i find myself / thinking too frequently / about jagerbombs

I didn’t ask why you spent all that time and energy making a hole with all the wrong tools instead of calling the landlord. 

Writers are running out of good guy badges. Virtue signaling shame ponies and other cultural nyet.

I got my dad’s big nose and people make fun of me for it.

It’s time.

[victory lobe] 

tiny towns or a dog could keep me pleased  

for six months, then I’d wear felt triangles  

look like December, have needles on me

molt on the plane to the

Because anytime is the right time for a haiku.

The Hungarian brings flowers to break up with me. I can see him through the window as he takes them from the trunk of his car in the Starbucks parking lot. 

See John's last Adventure Comic, "The Lucky Texan," here!